Here We Go Again

It's 3 o'clock in the morning and my alarm goes off. Yep, you read that, 3 A.M. We started our journey to LaCrosse, Wisconsin at 4:30.
Yesterday marked the first day that our hard work as a show choir would pay off. Viterbo is one of, if not THE first show choir competition of the year and we were there. We had two cross-town rivals also competing and for them (most likely), winning is everything. Our director has given us speech upon speech about how we cannot go to a competition in the hopes/expectations of winning, we must go into the competition to give our best show and the results may or may not reflect that.

My personal feeling is that I just love to perform. I am completely non-competitive. I "play" tennis. Or at least I used to. I had played since I was four and I was pretty decent. But what happened was that everybody I played with began to have to competition of who was better and such, and I'm really not into that. I wasn't the best by any means, but like I said, I was pretty good. I would do okay at tournaments, but would definitely never win. And at tournaments I usually just cared about getting past the first round and anything after that was great but didn't really matter. So when things got more competitive, and I found out I was better at singing and show choir, naturally I took that over tennis.

As my director says, I do not take show choir as a competition. But every time I go onstage, I do my best and leave my heart out there. That I think is the most wonderful thing, knowing you did your best and that whatever happens, you will always win in your heart.

This was incredibly essential at Viterbo. With these cross-town rivals, we couldn't let ourselves think that because we had done better than them last year, that the same would happen this year.

After day rounds, we were tied for third behind our cross-town rivals. After last year, I thought this was a good thing. You see, last year, we had a reputation for starting out on top, and then dropping after finals. So maybe this would be our time to start down and move up. After finals, we did move up, but only by a half a place. When we were tied for third, that means we were between 3rd and 4th. So we beat out who we tied with, and took third for our own.

Sure it was kind of a bummer to lose to our cross-town rivals, but who cares? We had a HUGE improvement from our day rounds and 2 of our judges told us we had the best ballad by far. So I take that as a win in its own. Congratulations show choir!

Will you let it be a competition?

The Stupidity of Advertisements

On Friday, my AP Lang class had a discussion on advertisements and there either brilliance or stupidity. I find the stupid ones to be the funniest. We discussed the AT&T advertisement with Luke Wilson defending themselves against the recent Verizon advertisements.

The following advertisement was presented by Verizon and was not taken well by the people at AT&T. However, as you will see later, their response is comical.


The above Verizon advertisement presented AT&T's 3G coverage map. And just see for yourself the rebuttal of AT&T.



AT&T uses their coverage map to hide the fact that their 3G service sucks. They lead their audience to believe that that is actually what Verizon was talking about but in fact they completely switched the accusation around.

Another advertisement I consider to be "stupid" would be the Snuggie commercials. Granted, Snuggies ARE amazing, the commercials don't do them justice. As you watch them, you wonder who was stupid enough to come up with the idea of the "one size fits all" thing for the Snuggie. I've been in one, they are actually more of a one size fits one giant kind of thing. No normal sized human being is going to fit into that Snuggie with easy access of the arms.

I may be overreacting. But I just think that the advertisement is extremely corny.

Though some of these advertisements may capture their audiences, when you actually look at them, you understand that the thought process behind them was slim to none. Congratulations all you unintelligent companies out there, you managed to make yourselves look like idiots.

Will you give in to the advertisements?

You Got Me Lookin So Crazy Right Now

Currently, I am listening to Pandora radio while I attempt to blog. Some people have that ability to listen to music as they do their work, but I am finding out I am not one of those people. I tend to get lost in the music and just stop functioning all together. I can no longer come up with interesting ideas. I took me literally ten minutes of listening to music before I discovered that the root of the problem was the music. So I'm thinking, "I'll blog about that!"

Ever since I was a kid, I've been in to music. I don't really care what music it is, just something to listen to. As I stated above though, the more I am listening to it, the less I am able to focus on blogging and more on just listening. Oh man, this is seriously one of the hardest things I've had to do.

"I Gotta Feeling" by The Black-Eyed Peas just came on and I feel like I may need to take a break here pretty quick.

Will you be distracted by the music?

Do you believe in Santa?

There is a huge debate out in the world about how old a kid should be before they know if Santa is real or not. For me, I found out pretty early. I was never flat out TOLD that there wasn't a Santa, though. I just kind of figured out. In my house however, we still have Santa bring presents.

Every Christmas Eve we go to church, and while we're out, Santa comes and lays our presents out on the couch. This has happened for as long as I can remember. My parents always told me, "Santa makes a special trip just for you to deliver your presents early." Well, though I thought "That's so nice of him, to take time out of his busy schedule just for ME."

Once I figured out he wasn't real though, my heart became set on finding out who the Santa at our house is. Every time I would ask my mother who Santa is she would just say that it's Santa, who else would it be. At our house, we believe the idea of Santa Clause is ever present in our lives. We believe that there is that person out there that solely believes in giving without any intention of receiving. His purpose in life is to please others.

I present this to my parents that I understand the idea of Santa but I just really want to know who Santa is in our house. I make sure I am the last out the door when we leave, and the first in the house on the way back, but the presents are always out, so that rules out my parents.

To this day, I still have no clue who our Santa is and though I am extremely curious, I think I might just stop trying to find out. After all, what if when I find out, we stop having Santa because the last remaining child who doesn't know found out? So yep, I'm going to stop. Merry Christmas!

Will Santa be real in your life?

"Oh. My. God. Chandla Bing!"

-Janice

Yep that's right, post number FOUR about Friends. This never really gets old for me because I am truly a Friends addict. What is amazing, is that yet again, I have found another addict just like me. She is a friend of mine's friend from college, from Chicago. She felt pretty awkward in our little group of friends so I decided to talk to her.

Low and behold, she is a Friends addict. Hardcore too, she has all ten seasons and little extra books on each one. We determined that this is over $500 dedicated to Friends. We had a pretty lengthy conversation about who our favorite characters are. We both agreed that Monica is our least favorite.

Our reasoning. Monica is just simply and unlike-able character. It's not that Courteney Cox's acting is bad in any way. Monica is just ANNOYING. Her little things that she does that make her annoying would be her awkward laughing, her obnoxious voice, her obsessive compulsive-ness, her overuse of the phrase "I Know," (to name a few).

It only makes sense that our next least favorite would be Ross, the loving brother of Monica. We couldn't really decide why we didn't like him, it could be just the nature of Ross. Not David Schwimmer (by the way I think it is sad that I am not using any outside sources for the actors OR any of the quotes I use, a tad pathetic, I know).

From then on the list was jumbled, her favorite was Rachel and mine is obviously Phoebe.

We then discussed having an actually Friends marathon over the summer. We would have to devote about a week of time to this because altogether there's about 72 hours of straight footage in all ten seasons. And we have planned that if they make a movie of this show, as seen here, she would drive in from Chicago and we would go to the midnight showing.

I am sooooo happy to have found another person (besides Smooth like Shea Butter) that is completely in love with Friends.

Will you be a Friends addict?

It's Christmas Time

Christmas carols have been playing nonstop for the past month or so. I like Christmas carols, don't get me wrong, but when they star playing before Thanksgiving. I think that's a little much. It always seems that they begin hype of the next holiday before the previous one has even happened. I am just waiting for the Valentine's Day commercials to start up on Christmas Eve.

To go along with the Christmas carols, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. This year, it looks as if that is going to happen. We recently had a major snow storm and it hasn't really warmed up since. My hopes are that it stays for the next couple of weeks, and hopefully we get more snow to add on to that.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" has been stuck in my head since we had to sing it for Cocoa and Carols, except in my head it doesnt have the normal version, it has the version where you leave out certain words and replace them with actions or "WOOOO!" You can just imagine what is going on in my head right about this time.

Well folks, it's Christmas time in the city.

Will you be ready for Christmas?

Hate is Not and Iowan Value

At Thespian Festival last year, I auditioned to be in the Iowa All-Chapter show, The Laramie Project. I got cast as 1 of 16 actors and received my script about a month later. We had then had a second audition for parts sometime in December-ish and then found out maybe in February who we were?

Anyway, we spent about a week rehearsing in July and then put on the actual show for Thespian Festival this year in November. At that particular show we were being adjudicated to go to International Thespian Conference. It was quite a sad day when we found out Friday that we were not accepted to go. Kind of a bummer that neither of the shows I was in got accepted (I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change and The Laramie Project).

The Laramie Project was quite possibly one of the best shows I have ever been in. I got to work with some of the top actors/actresses in the state and we got to spend a week just purely bonding and building upon our acting skills. Our "summer camp" was spent with 16 hour days running through the script, working with acting coaches scene by scene, doing runthroughs, and eating. You can imagine how tired we were by the end of the week.

This experience let me meet some of the coolest people I have ever met in my life. I am pretty sure the people of the Pleasant Valley region are the most fun people I have ever met in my life. One of them, who I injured many times unintentionally, and I spent just about the entire camp laughing, and this continued to the actual Thespian Festival practices. A person from Des Moines could potentially be the kookiest, goofy kid I have ever met in my life. He spent the summer camp making inappropriate jokes and provided the comic relief for the week.

I just wanna say that I miss everyone greatly and I am bummed that we aren't going on to Internationals. But oh well, I know we will all remain friends even after the fact. This little bump in the road (not being accepted) will not pull us apart.

Will you stay together?